What October Brings

Summer’s End Erica Ruppert

“It’s not much of a town,” Josh said.

Dana shrugged, watching the landscape rise and fall around them as Josh sped north on Route 41. Through the windshield, late October sun fell warm across her face.

“Up here, it’s all these little spread out towns. The main businesses were the lodges, fishing, hunting, family stuff, but most of those are gone now too.”

She turned to watch his profile.

“I haven’t seen my mother’s family for years,” he said. “But it’s time.”

He slowed as they approached another of the tiny villages that clung to the edge of the highway.

The plain blue road sign said “Newbrook”, but the mosaic of brown woods and fields continued. Then they passed a few widely-set houses, and were suddenly in the center of the town.

Dana looked around as they passed a low-slung motel set back in the trees, a small apartment block, a bank. At a T-intersection marked by a stoplight was an IGA, a dollar store, and a shuttered pizzeria. Past the light on 41 was a beer store and a medical clinic, then a few more houses on narrow strips of lawn.

Josh pulled into the driveway of one faded ranch house and turned off the engine. He sat for a moment, then reached over and squeezed Dana’s hand.

“Are you ready for this?” he asked.

Dana watched the impassive front of the house. The porch was decorated for Halloween, with corn stalks and fat yellow gourds, and what looked like a goat’s skull hanging on the door with a tufted beard on its jaw. She glanced away, up at the clean blue sky.

“Sure,” she said.

As they climbed from the car and stretched, a young woman came out and stood on the porch, waiting for them to climb the steps to reach her.

“Hey, Claire, you look good,” Josh said. “This is Dana.” He nudged her forward.

“It’s nice to meet you,” Dana said, and held out her hand. Claire hesitated before she took it, as if making up her mind.

“Claire and I used to play back in the swamp behind the airport when we were little,” Josh said.

“Airport’s been gone a long time. No one wants to fly in or out of here any more,” Claire said, looking past Dana with moony grey eyes. “Nursing home is out there now. But there’s still Airport Road, and swamp.”

Dana looked from Josh to Claire for any other details, but Claire kept her eyes on Josh, and Josh looked up at the curtained windows.

“You’re just in time for winter,” Claire said. “Year’s almost done. And Dad, well.”

“Worse?” Josh said.

“It’s chilly out here. Let’s go in” Claire said, and ushered Dana and Josh into the entryway.

“Dad’s in there,” she said, gesturing toward the living room.

Dana followed the line of Claire’s outstretched arm to where a man slumped in a rocking chair beside the television set. His face was slack, and moist, without any expression. A blanket spread across his misshapen legs looked spotted and damp, almost moldy, and his feet jutted out at broken angles from beneath the stained cloth.

“Hi, Joe,” Josh said.

Dana took Josh’s hand. “Can he hear us?” she asked him softly.

“Maybe,” Claire said. She herded them out of the room again.

“Our family originally came up from Massachusetts, after the witch trials,” she whispered, leaning close to Dana’s cheek. Dana held still. Josh looked disgusted, but Claire ignored him. “We bred like flies. Now the whole province is full of Masons and Mason cousins. And they say there’s a weakness in the blood.”

Claire straightened and raised her voice. “A weakness that lingers. So I’m surprised you came back, Josh, after your mother got away.”

He looked over her shoulder to where Joe drowsed. “You knew I would,” he said.

“What’s with Claire?” Dana asked him as she put her clothes into the dresser.

“She’s always been a little off,” Josh said. “But she’s okay. I mean she’s friendly, but she will say strange things at times. You just have to ignore it.”

“Did you tell her my family is from Massachusetts, too?”

“No,” he said.

Dana closed the drawer and stuffed her bag under the bed.

“What did she mean about your mother, and you coming back?”

Josh sighed. “Family stuff she still follows. The end of October, all Samhain and Halloween stuff, ending summer and letting winter in. My mother left it behind and never came back. Uncle Joe held that grudge a long time.”

Dana watched him.

“She makes you nervous,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Sometimes.”

He made sure the door was fully closed.

“Family can do that to you,” he said.

Dana woke before Josh did, and padded out of their room in search of coffee. The quiet in the house was broken only by cars passing on the highway.

She went into the cold, bright kitchen and looked around. The coffeemaker had been set up already. She turned it on and leaned against the counter while she waited for the carafe to fill.

Hung above the door was a dark wooden figure. She thought it might be some rustic crucifix. She reached up and took it down from its hook and found it wasn’t a cross after all. It was a damp clump of woody roots about the size of her hand, still spotted with clots of dirt, wound to form a loose nest. Two straight sticks stuck up at angles from the top of it.

Claire came out of her room, and saw Dana standing there holding it.

“The Mother Root,” she said, strolling into the kitchen. “The Lord of the Woods.”

“Is it for good luck?” Dana asked.

Claire smiled and moved past her. “Sure,” she said. “Something like that.”

In the afternoon Josh and Claire went out together. Dana stayed behind, not sure if she had wanted to. She drifted around the house, avoiding the living room where Joe sat in his slow decay. He disturbed her, not for his infirmity but because she had a primitive feeling that his helplessness was a lie.

At last she slipped on her coat, and headed out the kitchen door and around to the front of the house. The car was gone. She followed the road, kicking rocks along the pavement for a few hundred yards until the asphalt sidewalk began. The slanting sun fell over her head and back, driving her shadow ahead of her. There were a few people about, mainly going in and out of the supermarket driveway.

She reached the intersection in front of the IGA, and crossed the road to the wooden barn that was Davey’s Variety Store. The front was decorated with pumpkins and faded plastic masks, and a bin of bundled firewood. She went in. It was warmer inside than she expected, and smelled of lumber.

Behind the counter, a man Dana assumed was Davey sat reading a magazine, an oxygen tank clicking beside him. His skin was pale, almost grey, and his hair clung damply to his forehead. He did not look well. He glanced up at her as she came in then looked back down.

She checked out the bandanas and sunglasses and fishing supplies, the leftover beach toys from the summer trade and the bin of old DVDs for sale. The store was deeper than she had thought it was, with rooms separated by arched doorways. She kept poking. In the back, past the bookshelves loaded with used paperbacks and the pegboard displays of toiletries and children’s clothing was a door labeled “Private”.

Dana looked toward the register, but shelves blocked her view. The only sound in the place came from a radio set on a shelf somewhere toward the front.

Curious, Dana turned the knob, and was surprised to find the door unlocked. She opened it to find a narrow hall and a staircase to an upper floor. Layers of footprints smeared the treads in dust. At the top of the stairs was another door, poorly fitted in its frame. Light slipped out in slices along its edges. She climbed toward it, drawn by the yellow light.

The door opened silently when she tried it. She stood for a long time on the threshold, taking in the contents of the room.

A pile of dry vines and flaking grey mud leaned in a tangle against the far wall, crowned with a small, unnervingly female figure. Dana stepped quietly across the room, plucked the figure from its nest, turned it in her hands.

It was carved of a greasy white stone, about ten inches tall, with rows of heavy breasts like animal teats, and a grossly swollen belly. The face was a swirl of scratches, and from the forehead two horns curved up in a semicircle. The figure’s back and lower half were a mass of looping tendrils.

The stone was biting cold in her hand but she held it against the pain, studying the curves and lines that turned like a Möbius strip across the oval space where a face should have been. The pattern seemed to shift under her gaze. Uncomfortable, Dana put the figure back and tucked her hand underneath her arm to warm it again.

She turned away from the vines and the idol, and examined a shelf of books that stood below the room’s single window. The languages of the titles eluded her. She pulled out a massive folio, examining the dark leather cover embossed with vines and beasts. It was spongy, and warm. She didn’t want to open it.

She slid the heavy volume back and pulled out the one beside it. This one was beautiful, an octavo bound in stained, deep yellow silk with a winding silver pattern embroidered on the cover. She ran her fingers over the threads, and pulled them quickly away. Something in the design had slithered under her touch.

Wary now but drawn in, she opened the book and leafed through the heavy pages. Tucked between the leaves near the beginning was a sheet of lined notepaper covered in sharp blue lettering.

Without thinking, she folded the sheet and put it in her pocket.

She flipped more pages. The words shimmered and turned, unreadable. She blinked, clapped the book shut and replaced it on the shelf. Still, her hand lingered on it. She wanted it. She pulled it out again and slid it into her purse.

She looked around, suddenly furtive. The sinking sun cut through the window above her in a wide pale beam, catching in her eyes, making her wince. The room seemed to close around her. Something could see her here. She knew it under her skin

She stepped to the door, and listened only a moment before pattering fast down the stairs. At the bottom the world filled with the thin radio music again, and Davey gave no sign of having seen her as she fled.

Days melted into days. Josh and Claire were often out. They did not ask her to come. Without them, Dana kept to the house. The days were too chilly and the town too empty for her to want to wander alone.

She spent her hours reading in the living room with the husk of Joe for company. He deteriorated slowly, like a great wet cake sinking in on itself. Sometimes he sighed, but otherwise he made no sound. As far as Dana could tell Joe never left the living room. She didn’t want to be near him, but felt safer if she could watch him.

She finished the novel she had brought with her, and the magazines she found in the house. One dusky afternoon she pulled out the yellow silk book from where she had hidden it in her empty duffle bag under the bed.

She settled back in the living room and paged through it slowly, then got out the sheet of notebook paper. She tried to match it to a passage, but the language in the book was nothing she could grasp. She read the translation over, softly, aloud, her lips bending over the stranger syllables, her tongue halting at the sounds.

“Lord of the Wood, Black Goat of the Wood, Mother of the Wood and the Stars, Black Goat with a thousand young—Mother of Winter, End of the Sun, Ever Their praises, and abundance to the Black Goat of the Woods. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Iä! Shub-Niggurath!—”

Joe moaned and leaned toward her, reaching. The hand he raised looked eaten away, the skin grey and peeling. Dana shrieked and leapt up, the book falling from her lap.

Claire stood in the doorway. She smiled, her lips wet.

“It’s all right,” Claire said. “Don’t let him bother you.”

“He doesn’t,” Dana said, gathering herself again.

“Josh, I mean” Claire said. She went to smooth the blanket over Joe’s misshapen lap, pressing him back into the chair. “There now,” she said to him.

She came over to stand beside Dana. She glanced down at the book on the floor, then up into Dana’s eyes. “Josh knows what he has to do, and he doesn’t want to do it. Family is hard, sometimes.”

She lifted Dana’s hand in her own, turned it over.

“Look,” Claire said, pressing her finger against Dana’s palm. “Do you see what’s written there?”

“No,” Dana said, pulling her hand back.

Joe snorted wetly in his chair, falling to one side. Claire moved to straighten him.

“I think you will,” Claire said, bending to tend her father.

The evening was cold and still. Dana had talked Josh into leaving the house with her, to show her the quiet town. He had grown up here, after all. There were only six streets, and most of the small houses that lined them were dark. Some of the lighted ones were decorated with ghosts and plastic skulls.

“The way you talked, I always thought Newbrook was bigger,” she said as they looped past the nursing home back to the main road. Her breath hung white in the air. “There can’t be many trick or treaters. There’s nobody here.”

Josh smiled. “There are some,” he said. “The town clears out after tourist season.”

His voice dropped. “But twenty, thirty years ago, we lost a lot of people. They went...elsewhere.”

“I guess that happens to a lot of small towns. The economy changes and it’s hard to stay.”

“Things do change, but our traditions…they make us,” Josh said, and fell silent.

They strolled past Davey’s, and Dana laughed with sudden bravado.

“You know there’s some weird shrine in there?” she said, keeping her voice low.

Josh stared at her, no humor in his eyes. He stopped walking.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

Dana looked at him.

“Above the shop. Upstairs, there’s a shrine set up. Fertility goddess, I think. And a collection of old occult books. I couldn’t read them. Someone started to translate them and—”

“Why were you upstairs at all?” Josh hissed at her. “Did anyone see you?”

She stepped back.

“I was just goofing around.”

“What is wrong with you?.”

Dana blinked back sudden tears. She looked at her feet, then up over Josh’s shoulder at the side of Davey’s building. The narrow attic window was lit with a dim yellow glow. Shadows moved across the light. She wondered who was up there.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He pushed past her. “We have to go home now,” he said.

He was trembling. She realized he was scared.

She followed him into the soft blue night, back up the road.

She heard him leave the house before dawn. She heard low voices from outside, then the crush of gravel under wheels. She rolled over and willed herself back to sleep.

Claire woke her before noon, standing over her, watching until Dana opened her eyes.

“I haven’t been a good host,” Claire said. “I’ve left you to your own devices all this time.”

Dana blinked and sat up on the edge of the bed, pulling the blankets around her. She was groggy and pliant, beginning to feel unmoored in this empty town.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I’ve found stuff to do.”

Claire sat beside her, her grey eyes huge. Dana could feel the heat from Claire’s skin.

“Where’s Josh?”

“Around,” Claire said. “But I have something for you.”

Dana opened the twist of paper Claire handed her. Inside lay a tangled clutch of roots, grey with dirt.

Claire grinned. Dana nodded, closing her fingers around it.

“This is the welcome you should have,” Claire said. “You do belong here.”

“I hope so,” Dana said.

The afternoon was almost gone when Dana realized Josh had not returned. She had lounged away the time outside on the porch with the goat skull for company, bundled in her coat, too tired to read. Not a single car had passed. She felt as if she were waiting at the end of the world.

Claire walked out of the stand of leafless trees that edged the property, and waved.

“Dana,” Claire called, “I have something else for you.”

“Okay,” Dana said, not moving from her seat.

“No, come with me,” Claire said, coming closer.

“It’s going to be dark. Josh has to be back soon.”

“Maybe. We’ll leave him a note” Claire said, pulling a crumpled ball of notebook paper from her front pocket. She smoothed it out on the hood of the car and tucked it under the wiper blade.

“He’ll know what to do,” she said.

Dana sighed and got up, following Claire across the yard. As she passed the car she glanced at the scrap of paper. The writing on was the same lettering as in the yellow silk book.

The sun slanted down behind the trees as the afternoon waned, the sky dissolving to a deeper blue. They walked into town, and then turned down Airport Road to follow its long loop. When they reached the nursing home Claire pulled Dana across the facility’s parking lot toward the woods behind it.

As they passed the building Dana saw a line of slack figures propped in wheelchairs, drowsing in the deepening dusk. Their postures reminded her of how Joe sagged, boneless yet waiting. From where she stood it looked as if their skin was sloughing off like birch bark, peeling away and drifting across the concrete pad in shreds. Like masks, she thought. Like paper masks for Halloween. She wiped the back of her hand across her eyes.

“What’s wrong with them?” she asked Claire.

Claire paid no attention to the nursing home patients. “Inbreeding. Cousins,” she said, without glancing toward them.

Dana looked at the people in the chairs. Maybe Claire was right, and it was an ineffable weakness in the blood.

“Mason cousins?” she asked.

“Come on,” Claire said. “It’s not far.”

Behind the home’s parking lot a path snaked back through rough grass toward the trees. Claire tugged Dana along behind her, urging her to speed up, to reach the woods. Cedars and pines and bare maples grew over the path, blocking their line of sight, forcing them to push through the branches. Over their own noises Dana heard voices, and the sounds of other passage all around. Claire gave no sign she heard anything.

In less than a mile the trees thinned out, becoming sparse and unhealthy. The ground grew soggy underfoot as they walked into the swamp. Cold seeped through the soles of Dana’s shoes. Claire stopped before they reached standing water.

“Here,” she said, and pointed. “This.”

The hulk of an ancient willow listed like a shipwreck a hundred feet from where they stood, rotten and broken but still alive. Where its roots had pulled free of the ground a great pit opened, greasy with mud. It gaped like a mortal wound to the earth.

Claire raised her arm and the sky suddenly dulled, the remaining light fading into ocher and purple and acid green. Night swarmed down.

Dana saw movement near the jagged pit. Long branches whipped with no wind to drive them. Distorted figures moved through shadows. Across the shallow water voices rose and fell in ugly song.

“Iä! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Lord and mother, hear us. Lord of the woods, hear us. Mother of Winter, hear us. Shub-Niggurath! Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!”

Dana recognized the words, and screamed. She turned to run but Claire grabbed a fistful of her hair and dragged her forward into the water. “No,” she hissed, her grey eyes like lanterns, “You belong here.”

Dana twisted, caught. Figures emerged from the cavern beneath the willow, moving to form a ring around them.

“Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young,” Claire chanted with them, and yanked Dana’s head in time to the incantation.

Dana could see the approaching figures had heads and arms and swollen bellies, but a swarm of churning limbs where legs should grow. They had faces, with the skin grey and loose and slipping. As they drew closer, she thought one was Joe. Then the face she recognized fell off the misshapen head.

She screamed again, helpless, wild. Claire called out again, laughing.

The dimmed sky erupted in roiling black clouds, and withering cold washed over them. Water crackled and froze around them, crunching beneath the moving forms. Dana fell forward into the swamp, leaving a clutch of her hair in Claire’s grasp. She struggled to rise, but the ground seemed to shift under her. She looked up.

Something had heard the chanting.

Shadows in the sky coalesced into a column of black mist, shot with lightning and scored with flickering tendrils of smoke and muscle. It descended, wet with a slime like an afterbirth. It pooled in the hole beneath the shivering tree. Smoke and ichor dripped over the figures as they called out to it. Where the dripping touched them they burned.

The chants howled into a frenzy. Claire had forgotten her, staring up at the blackness with joy and terror in her face. Dana gazed at the thing descending. She did not want to run, now.

“Iä!” she whispered. “Shub-Niggurath!”

She belonged.

A human figure emerged from the woods, dressed in a horned goat’s skull and a still-wet skin, dancing and lurching and raising its bare arms to the thing in the sky.

Dana recognized Josh beneath the costume. He chanted, too, raising his voice to be heard above the roar of the tentacled cloud squatting over them, above the relentless chanting of the circling crowd. But his words were different than theirs. She stood unsteadily and reached for him, trying to answer.

Lightning cracked across the sky. Dana’s senses wobbled as if she tumbled under waves.

She could see through Josh’s eyes, under the edge of the skull. She watched his bare feet cross the rutted swamp to the fallen willow. She felt the weight of the dead skin hanging from his shoulders. She felt the fear that weighed in his lungs, and the need. He knew what to do.

Then she stuttered back, fell, and was in herself again as Claire lifted her and led her into the pit. There she pushed Dana to her knees in the icy mud, muttered an unintelligible string of sounds, and retreated.

Something squirmed in the slime Dana knelt in. She arched away, startled. Long flexing limbs slipped out and wrapped her body, binding her to a cold mass that moved over her skin, languid, lithe, slippery as water. There was foulness in its touch, a stirring of desires that should not be sated. The mass seeped into her flesh, displacing her. She cried out in mortal fear and delight. She wanted this.

Josh stumbled forward under his heavy wrappings, tangling with all her new limbs. She felt the crack of his head striking rock, felt flailing strands stretch from her and sink into him. He pressed against the slick resistance of her swarming muscle, blooming as the undertow of her swelling body bore him deeper into her. He dissolved like sugar in water. Like warmth in winter. He had to end, that she could begin.

She opened her mouth to sing out but another flowed in. Great ropy strands within her swelled, filling her, bursting her apart. Her flesh stretched and shredded, her mind scattered like dust. A million icy stars spilled out of her, a million cilia thrashed from her skin into blackest space. She rose in the column of her own wet flesh and smoke, seeing across the voids through a million lenses.

The chanting voices were so far away, the creatures that made their pleas so very small. She could not understand what they said with their small voices. What they wanted. But it didn’t matter.

As she opened into the cloud and chaos, she saw the vast sweep of the sky above her, as deep as time, as empty. And the million scattered stars she birthed were still too few to dispel the dark.

What October Brings:

A Lovecraftian Celebration of Halloween

Stories are copyright © their individual authors.

This edition copyright © 2018 Celaeno Press. All rights reserved.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be sold or used in any way in any other work or product without explicit advance written permission from Celaeno Press. Thank you for helping to protect the author’s rights.

Cover art © 2018 Daniele Serra

ISBN: 978-4-909473-51-6

Edition 1.0

Celaeno Press

CELAENOPRESS.COM